Find out what your wins and losses can teach you.

Define the group before reading the outcomes. For example, review quotes for one service sold to similar buying units during a stated period. Include wins, confirmed losses and unresolved decisions where they belong in that population. Record which cases are excluded and why.

Separate different buying situations. A repeat order under an existing agreement, a competitive tender and a first purchase after a technical trial have different decision processes. Combining them into one loss-rate chart may hide the question you need to answer. Use the ideal customer profile to describe relevant fit conditions without rewriting the profile simply to explain away every loss.

If only a few comparable decisions exist, examine them as cases. You can identify a problem worth investigating without claiming it is the dominant reason your market does not buy. The measurement guide explains why population, timing and missing outcomes matter when making comparisons.

For each case, retain the customer need, current quote or proposal, decision date, known participants, outcome and source of the explanation. Give the explanation an evidence label in the internal record: buyer-confirmed, team interpretation, or unknown. A required CRM field should allow an honest unknown state.

Preserve the wording needed to understand the issue, subject to the access and retention rules for the source. “Price” could mean the total exceeded an approved budget, payment timing was unsuitable, scope was misunderstood or an alternative covered fewer requirements. The short category helps organise a review; the context explains what it means.

Salesforce’s opportunity guidance describes tracking opportunity details and the people involved. Use those records to locate evidence. A closed stage records an outcome in the system; it does not validate the reason entered beside it.

Where a follow-up is appropriate, ask the relationship owner to seek clarification through the agreed channel. A useful question is “What mattered most in the decision, and was anything in our proposal difficult to assess?” Avoid leading with the team’s preferred explanation, such as asking only whether the price was too high.

The buyer may decline, give a partial answer or describe several factors. Record those limits. Separate a reported fact about the decision from a judgement about your offer. If the buyer names another supplier, keep the statement within the case; it does not establish a general claim about that supplier’s price, quality or performance.

Use quote history to ensure you ask about the proposal the customer actually reviewed. A later internal revision cannot explain a decision made against an earlier version.

Write down the proposed change, the evidence behind it, how you expect it to help and how you will assess it. For the scope-comparison case, the change might be a clearer included-work section in the proposal. A clearer section should help buyers compare equivalent scope before deciding. First check whether they can explain the difference.

Changes may belong in positioning and messaging, a content plan, qualification questions or proposal handling. Make the change where the misunderstanding arose. A new article will not fix an estimator sending an obsolete attachment.

Public market information can help investigate a question raised by the review. Keep it in a separate competitive-intelligence review, with dated sources and clear limits. A team’s loss explanation should not become an unsupported statement in a customer-facing campaign.

Before changing the process, save the old question, scope and observation window. Record when the change was introduced and which opportunities encountered it. Later outcomes may reflect different customer needs, timing or conditions as well as your intervention. Keep those alternative explanations visible.

Select four recent decisions and ask two colleagues to assess the evidence behind each explanation independently. Compare their disagreements before discussing fixes. If one reads a buyer-confirmed reason and the other sees an internal inference, clarify that record first. Then choose one change small enough to evaluate.

Commission a focused review through Plan and hand the findings to your team, or agree how to apply them in a Build campaign. Supported findings can improve targeting, messaging and follow-up while a campaign runs. New proposal tools or wider review processes need their own scope. The assignment should leave you with a useful decision, the evidence behind it and a clear account of what is still unknown.